A New Project for the School
Master’s Musings, December 2023
A New Project for the School
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Master's Musings
Some people are simply perpetual students of astrology. They love our ancient art and they can’t get enough of it – and when it comes to something you can’t get enough of, astrology is as good as it gets since the field is practically infinite in scope. Those eternal students are welcome in our school – we know that not all of us are set on becoming practicing, counseling astrologers, and that’s fine. But of course for many of us, our aim is to use our astrological education to start making a difference in other people’s lives, perhaps even doing astrology professionally. While we welcome everyone, our school is specifically geared with that counseling intention in mind – and that leads us directly to a basic challenge: learning astrology theoretically is one thing, but learning to present consultations to the general public is another.
When it comes to sitting confidently with clients, there’s no substitute for practice. Your voice will become more fluent – and more your own – over time. To help you get there, we also have our more advanced courses. For example, we just finished our first master class, which was a big success. Our counseling course will open up soon too. Together, those courses will help prepare you for “the real world” of working with clients.
What this newsletter is about is that we are planning another way to support you in getting there.
The purpose of the FCEA is not to “clone” me – well, at least not exactly. Obviously there is some of that “cloning” in the mixture. My long-term hope has always been to help everyone in the school “stand on my shoulders” – then once they’ve taken in the view, to see things I’ve never seen or figured out myself. Astrology is vast, but over the years I’ve whittled its corpus down to some core techniques that are powerful, robust, and meaningful enough to enough people that you can build a popular practice with them. In the school, we put blinders on you and aim you toward mastery of that single approach – a process that takes three or four years, thus shaving centuries off the impossible process of “learning everything about astrology.”
Once you’ve neared the end of your FCEA training, you’ve won half the battle: you’ve got the theory down. The next stop is finding your own voice. Again, some of our advanced courses will help you with that process, but we are in the middle of planning another way to support you. We intend to create a library of actual readings that I have done. Here’s how it will work – or at least how we hope it will work. Getting there will require your help.
INTRODUCING CIRCLE – A NEW FCEA COMMUNITY FORUM
We have exciting news for 2024! We will soon have Circle implemented – a sort of private social media “watering hole” for the school. It’s being created as a space for the FCEA community to connect and communicate with one another in a fun and informal environment, and will also include a library of videos and other materials.
We are also hoping that this new community forum will create a wonderful replacement for our discontinued study group calls. Although the study group calls have had a low participation rate (only 10%), we understand that the 10% of students who did attend them valued them very much. Yet the low participation rate did not make them sustainable for the school. We trust that our new offerings through Circle will offer everyone a new means of inspiration and an even more sustainable (and hopefully broader) community connection. It will also better serve our international student body who reside in a wide variety of different time zones, as Circle will be available 24/7. Once we open this online gathering space in early 2024, everyone will be able to engage with the platform to some extent.
We realize that the past distinctions between Student and Member were confusing, especially because we have always considered every student an integral member of the FCEA Community, whether or not they had paid for the additional benefits of FCEA Membership. So, from now on, everyone will be considered a Community Member—as we introduce two levels of membership: the FCEA Membership (free) and the FCEA Premium Membership (for an annual fee) which will feature enhanced memberships benefits.
Here’s how all of this will work: Everyone who registers for an FCEA account on our website is able to watch Free Community Calls available on forrestastrology.center – and now they’ll also be able to create a free FCEA account on the Circle platform. FCEA Members who purchase the Premium Membership will be invited to attend all of the FCEA’s live Monthly Q&A calls with me (which are included in our courses for current students) and have the opportunity to continually chat and comment as a community within the Circle platform. Premium Members will also be able to access all previous Q&A Calls (from December 2020 through the present day) on Circle, and chat and comment there as a community, continually.
Premium FCEA Members who are also students at the 200 Level and above, and including FCEA graduates, will gain special access to a rotating library of donated recorded Steven Forrest readings.
CALLING FOR VOLUNTEERS
Over the years, many of you have had me do private readings. We would like to ask if you might consider sharing them with the school. Immediately I want to underscore that this would be completely voluntary, with no pressure implied. For totally understandable reasons, many of you will want to keep those recordings confidential. Again, no pressure!
If you do decide to help, we will keep everything confidential, at least with the boundaries of the school. But I often use people’s names – at least their first names – in the readings. And naturally we would need your chart as well. We can delete last names from them. We could even delete birth data, but it’s often not hard to reconstruct it from a chart. The reality is that other students would often “know it was you.” We want to be transparent about that. Sometimes when I do a reading for someone, they’ve shared sensitive information with me in advance. I may reference it directly in the recording. If anyone in that situation prefers not to share the reading, we support you 100%. In fact if anyone prefers not to share their readings for any reason at all, that’s fine too – yet again: no pressure!
For legal and ethical reasons, we will have anyone who volunteers their recording sign a waiver granting the school the right to use the material.
Naturally, we’d be interested in all kinds of readings – a birthchart analysis, transits/progressions, even synastries. We welcome any and all of your submissions through this online reading donation form.
We hope you will consider it, but please don’t do it if you feel ambivalent about it. If we don’t have enough volunteers from within the school, I would plan to put out a more general request on social media. Over the years, I’ve done many thousands of readings for the general public – some of you may actually be reading these words. Depending on the response of our FCEA community, we may or may not reach out more broadly.
Access to these readings will be posted in a limited access area of the new FCEA Circle platform, accessible only by 200 Level students and above, and graduates of the FCEA, who have active FCEA Premium Memberships. Therefore, these readings will not be available to the general public – it’s strictly for our student body.
Soon after receiving your reading donation application, we will have a page on the website where you can easily complete the online waiver and securely upload your reading. Thank you so much for your consideration!
SO WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
That question brings us right back to whether or not the FCEA is an attempt to “clone Steven Forrest.” I think the most honest answer is “at first yes, and then ultimately no.” And with that said, we swing back to a point I made right at the beginning of this newsletter – first you learn astrological theory, then you find your own voice. Inevitably your voice will at first probably resemble my own at least to some extent.
Over the years, I’ve developed a huge reservoir of stories, metaphors, and images. They all work well for quickly telegraphing complex astrological ideas across to my clients. I am hoping that if you let some of my readings drone in the background as you drive your car or clean your house, you’ll pick up some of that language. I encourage you to use any of it that you want. I have no proprietary feelings about it – in fact, I probably “stole” half of it myself, except I can’t remember when or from who.
THE TIME TABLE
When will we make this happen? Soon! There are too many wild cards in the mix for us to be more precise than that. Getting Circle up and running – and getting us all signed up for it – is a process that will take a while. Then there’s the unanswered question of how many of you will feel comfortable sharing your readings. We know they’re very personal! So we’ll see how long that takes.
We’ll do this though – and I’m confident that it will be a major piece of the “endgame” of your FCEA education.
Steven Forrest
December 2023